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Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

Find the perfect audience for your poems, stories, essays, and reviews by researching over one thousand literary magazines. In the Literary Magazines database you’ll find editorial policies, submission guidelines, contact information—everything you need to know before submitting your work to the publications that share your vision for your work.

Whether you’re pursuing the publication of your first book or your fifth, use the Small Presses database to research potential publishers, including submission guidelines, tips from the editors, contact information, and more.

Research more than one hundred agents who represent poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers, plus details about the kinds of books they’re interested in representing, their clients, and the best way to contact them.

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.

Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.

Research newspapers, magazines, websites, and other publications that consistently publish book reviews using the Review Outlets database, which includes information about publishing schedules, submission guidelines, fees, and more.

Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Directory of Writers.

Download our free app to find readings and author events near you; explore indie bookstores, libraries, and other places of interest to writers; and connect with the literary community in your city or town.

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.

Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Directory of Writers.

Find information about more than two hundred full- and low-residency programs in creative writing in our MFA Programs database, which includes details about deadlines, funding, class size, core faculty, and more. Also included is information about more than fifty MA and PhD programs.

Whether you are looking to meet up with fellow writers, agents, and editors, or trying to find the perfect environment to fuel your writing practice, the Conferences & Residencies is the essential resource for information about well over three hundred writing conferences, writers residencies, and literary festivals around the world.

Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.

Discover historical sites, independent bookstores, literary archives, writing centers, and writers spaces in cities across the country using the Literary Places database—the best starting point for any literary journey, whether it’s for research or inspiration.

Take a guided tour of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, and many other cities. We asked authors, booksellers, publishers, editors, and others to share the places they go to connect with writers of the past, to the bars and cafés where today’s authors give readings, and to those sites that are most inspiring for writing.

Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

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Each year the Readings & Workshops program provides support to hundreds of writers participating in literary readings and conducting writing workshops. Learn more about this program, our special events, projects, and supporters, and how to contact us.

Organizations based in California, New York State, as well as in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, Tucson, and Washington D.C., are welcome to apply for support from the Readings & Workshops program for their literary events.

Presenters and writers who need to submit a report after a P&W-supported event can get started here. Reports help us demonstrate the value of the Readings & Workshops program to funders and help us continue to offer support to writers and organizations hosting literary events.

Digital Digest: Apps Reveal Reading’s Social Side

For centuries, the common-place book—a personal compendium of quotations, notes, and other textual gleanings—was the mark of a literate mind. In late October, media developer Betaworks took a step toward updating the genre when it launched Findings (findings.com), an online community that lets users compile and share excerpts from books and websites, adding a collaborative dimension to a practice that once helped shape the intellectual development of figures such as as John Milton, Thomas Jefferson, and W. H. Auden.

Billed as a “social commonplace,” Findings allows members to sort through material by author, title, or source, and has plans in the works to enable the kinds of idiosyncratic organizational schemes emblematic of old-school commonplacing. Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead Books, 2010) and a partner in the project, stresses the utility of the commonplace to writers as a tool for thinking. “You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches,” he said last year during a talk at Columbia University, “the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.”

Four years in the making, Findings is the product of what Johnson calls a “slow hunch,” joining a swelling group of digital endeavors that are placing new emphasis on those aspects of reading that lie beyond the covers of a single book or the confines of an individual library. It’s tempting to characterize this shift as the displacement of a tradition of solitary communion with an author by a noisy new collective engagement. But reading has always been social; technology only inflects it in curious ways. And just as changing media go hand in hand with evolving practices, some of these new modes of reading can feel decidedly familiar. Fittingly, one of the first quotations collected on Findings, from The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs, 2009) by librarian and book historian Robert Darnton, suggests precisely this sort of recapitulation: “Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.”

Indeed, certain forms of social reading are recognizable as digital heirs to the literary salons and book clubs that sprang up with the proliferation of print. Whether the focus is on experiments in mass simultaneity—as with the Twitter-based 1book140 project (which, under the aegis of the Atlantic, aims to be the world’s largest book club), or in more intimate forums, as with BookGlutton (www.bookglutton.com), which connects readers “inside digital books” through shared annotations and bookmarks—literature is more than ever a medium for interpersonal connection. The collective wisdom of the crowd itself can be leveraged—for better or worse—through the user-generated content on platforms such as Goodreads (www.goodreads.com), or via recommendations pulled from blogs by ReadFeeder (www.thereadfeeder.com).

The movement of reading away from the printed page and onto the screen has led new e-reading devices to incorporate social access into the technology itself. Amazon’s Kindle now (optionally) highlights passages that have drawn significant reader attention while Kobo—the first e-book vendor to develop a social-reading app—has upped the ante by releasing Pulse, a platform that features in-text comments, reviews, and recommendations collected in real time from readers. Subtext offers a similar social-reading experience, describing itself as “a community in the pages of the book.” The app, which works across various e-book platforms (although not, as of this writing, with the Nook or Kindle), integrates commentary and digital extras from authors, publishers, and, of course, readers, encouraging users to contribute their own content by offering game-style “points” that can be redeemed for additional “expert” annotations.

Subtext and similarly ambitious social-reading schemes are keeping digital books in flux, spurring readers to continually revisit their pages. Just as the commonplace books that inspired Findings were made possible by one kind of technological revolution—the widespread availability of cheap paper—a new sort of abundance, prompted by a more recent technological revolution, is shifting practices once again, and books are being recast as relationships. Digital literature is beginning to demonstrate how books, rather than being static products, can be endlessly unfolding processes.

When the Google Books settlement was shot down on March 22 by judge Denny Chin, who cited copyright and competition concerns, plans for not-for-profit alternatives such as the Digital Public Library of America began taking shape.